When classical composer Steven Reich decided on the cover image for the CD of “WTC 9/11” — his rattling and elegiac response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — he chose a photo that reflected the documentary tone of his album.

Created for the renowned Kronos Quartet, “WTC 9/11” incorporates recordings from air traffic control and the New York City Fire Department, as well as interviews with people who lived or worked near the World Trade Center.

So Reich chose a tweaked photo, showing dark plumes drifting from the north tower. Mid-cover, midair, the second jet heads for the south tower.

When the record label Nonesuch put the album cover on its website, a kind of hell broke lose. “When did Nonesuch hire Bruckheimer?” carped one of many online comments, referring to the producer of such explosive action flicks as “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor.”

“WTC 9/11” has a new cover for its Sept. 20 release. Because, wrote Reich in a statement, “To have this reaction to the music usurped by the album cover seemed completely wrong.”

Wrong, yes, but not surprising.

In the 10 years since 9/11, artists have tried to take us beyond those damnable images, even as they use them to do what we expect of art: to make us weep, gnash our teeth and rend our garments; to speak our anger; to console us; and to help us hope and force us to understand.

They have delivered the good and, at times, the very good. But few, if any, of the 9/11 artworks have felt as epic as the event that gave rise to them. Which poses a question: In tussling with the remains of that day, why have so few artists given us a work worthy of the wound?

There are a deep ache and transcendent murmurs in composer John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” — a work of brass and blare, sirens and chimes — that suggest it may make it into the canon of sorrows and solace. Reich’s “WTC 9/11” also approaches the enduring.

And there is epic promise in “Decade,” an ambitious theatrical endeavor being staged in London. British producer-director Rupert Goold enlisted a number of writers — among them American playwrights Lynn Nottage and John Logan, and English historian Simon Schama — for a work that grapples with responses to the events of 9/11 and the wars that followed.

Still, we ask: Where is our “Guernica,” Pablo Picasso’s riven response to the bombing of a Basque village? Our “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust masterwork? Why has there been no “When the Levees Broke,” Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina dirge? Or a “Roots,” TV’s groundbreaking miniseries about slavery?

Or even an “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s sublime take on the AIDS crisis?

Yes, there have been startling, necessary, cathartic works. TV network FX cast Denis Leary as a grieving, raging New York firefighter in its touching series “Rescue Me.”

In his 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer gave readers Oskar Schell. The tambourine-playing, 9-year-old inventor of the strange and marvelous finds a key left by his father, who died in the twin towers. Not afraid to connect the dots, Foer also weaves the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima into Oskar’s tale. (The book is set for its big-screen close-up in December.)

When it came out in 2006, Paul Greengrass’ film “United 93” was hailed for its deft editing and real- time approach to the hijacking of the one plane that didn’t find its target that day. But the film, while brilliantly crafted, seemed to this critic (and still does) like the too-quick expression of a demanding need to envision the heroism of those passengers.

But then, filmmakers have been particularly vexed by the real images of planes piercing buildings and the towers collapsing. After all, one of the constant refrains to the New York attacks were that they “looked like a movie.” Whenever those images have been sampled in a film — including one as artfully composed as “United 93” — they produce a recoil.

When it comes to movies, the indirect has often trumped straightforward works such as “United 93” or Oliver Stone’s first-responder melodrama, “World Trade Center.” For instance, James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire” — about high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s traversing of the twin towers in 1974 — speaks eloquently of what was lost that day. No, not the buildings but a kind of human embrace of the possible. With its hopeful little man amid the towers, it provides a space for mourning and affirmation.

Still, if the epic wickedness of that crystalline September day has not yet produced a monumental piece of art, is that a failing of art? Of our artists?

Or is it a testament to how much we continue thrashing about in the wake of the roiling history that day wrought?

After all, in our moment of collective grief, we turned as a nation to our warriors, not our artists.

Defining ourselves

“Artists are part of the citizenry, like writers and reporters and accountants. We all view the world in different ways; all our opinions are valid,” says Brian Freeland, artistic director of Denver’s The LIDA Project.

“As artists, we tend to have a vocabulary that helps facilitate conversation. The work at times wants to stand on its own. And there are times when you say, ‘I want the work to be long-lasting, I want it to be part of the canon.’ But then there are more important things to do day-to-day.”

Friday, the experimental theater group opened “Justin Bieber Meets Al Qaeda.” The self-described “theatrical editorial” uses texts (from Albert Camus and Max Frisch) and context (the tyranny of the trivial) to discuss the past decade. The play’s cheeky title arrived when the ensemble tried to boil down our age’s pressing events, Freeland says.

“We came back to what an explosion of escapist pop culture we’ve wrought. At looking at what has really defined us, it’s been, over the last decade, pop culture and al-Qaeda. Those are what make the news. Those are our water-cooler conversations.”

There is no shortage of new and revived works seizing on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Amy Waldman’s recently published novel, “The Submission,” imagines what would happen had a Muslim won the right to design the 9/11 memorial at ground zero.

“The Guys” is being restaged in New York and London, as well as in Denver. The play about a journalist helping an NYPD captain write eulogies was first performed in December 2001 at the Flea Theater, near ground zero.

And it’s not only American artists returning to the scene of the crime. With stories including on about a U.S. Marine on leave and another about a street vender in Tunisia, the Brit literary magazine Granta devoted an issue to the clashes and connections made in the intervening decade. Neil LaBute’s 2002 play, “The Mercy Seat,” is having a revival in London. A drama about a different kind of surivor’s guilt, the play features two co-workers who escape the fates of their World Trade Center colleagues because they were trysting. “Decade” opened for previews in London on Sept. 1.

Anniversaries have an authentic ritual purpose, not just a marketing hook, LIDA’s Freeland believes.

“The whole political ecology over the last 10 years is very different,” he says. “Because of the anniversary, it seems to be linked together with some tidy info-graphic and timeline, but it has been really awkward and messy.”

Unfinished business

When David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet asked Reich to create a piece for the string ensemble using prerecorded voices in 2009, he said yes. Then he hung up the phone and pondered.

“I hadn’t the foggiest notion who were going to be the voices,” he said by phone from Vermont.

“Two months went by like that, and then the light bulb went off. And I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wake up. You — meaning me — have unfinished business.’ “

On Sept 11, 2001, Reich and his wife were at their house in Vermont. Their son, daughter-in-law and grandchild were in the composer’s New York apartment, four blocks north of the World Trade Center.

“My son called and said, ‘I think they’ve bombed the World Trade Center again. From our house you can’t see the towers because there’s a very big building blocking the view. But you can hear, and you can feel the impact.’

“We turned on the TV and saw the second plane hit. . . .”

Eventually a neighbor got Reich’s family up to Westchester.

The voices Reich uses for “WTC 9/11” come from a NORAD air traffic controller and New York City Fire Department recordings; from interviews he conducted with his Lower Manhattan neighbors and friends; from two women who sat shmira, reciting Psalms at the morgue erected for the bodies; and from a cantor and a cellist, who sing from the Torah and Psalms.

At times, the strings create a sonic shadow to the voices, trailing them intimately. Other times, the violins give the barest hint of the horror Bernard Herrmann uncovered in “Psycho.”

The three movements take listeners from disaster to recollection to consolation. But the last only up to a point. The piece ends as it began: with the gnawing sound, that incessant warning phones make when they’ve been off the hook too long. When there’s a disconnect.

“When I heard that sound, I was like ‘Hey, that’s how the piece begins,” said Reich.

That’s also how it ends, even after the beautiful contemplation “World to Come.”

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